QUINN ENDING REIGN AS 'ZORBA' -- FOR NOW

NEW YORK -- Anthony Quinn, who made a lusty mark on the world as that bold, sinewy Greek known as Zorba more than 20 years ago, is about to pluck the last red carnation from behind his ear.

For the moment, anyway.

Quinn first played Zorba in the 1964 film version of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel Zorba the Greek. For the past four years he has toured the country in the musical version, written by Joseph Stein, John Kander and Fred Ebb. The actor will give his final performance in the role at the Westbury Music Fair in Westbury, N.Y., today.

In this latest incarnation, the musical, originally presented on Broadway without great success in 1968 with Herschel Bernardi as Zorba, will have run more than 1,200 performances and have grossed more than $48 million, ranking it among the most lucrative revivals in theater history.

"Zorba's really about me," Quinn said the other day in his New York apartment. "Why I keep playing him is that I keep learning from the man."

Surrounded by his personal art collection, Quinn looked trim in tan slacks and a blue shirt, his left arm wrapped in a bandage after a fall from a bicycle.

Quinn, who is 70, spoke of that injury as well as other physical problems that have come with advancing age -- a recurrent sciatica, for example, has made his now-famous dance to bouzouki music difficult at times.

He said that he not only has shared experiences with Zorba over the course of his life but also has learned important lessons from the character. Perhaps the most significant, he said, was learning to come to terms with his own mortality.

"For 60 years I never accepted death," he said. "Whenever the question came up I avoided it. Now I've bought a burial place because of Zorba, a burial place near Venice."

He said that in many ways playing Zorba had been a painful exercise because "an actor goes through his whole life's examination in one performance." The role forced him to confront personal issues that for years had remained buried and unresolved.

The great loss of his life, Quinn explained, was the death 40 years ago of his first child, a son, who wandered one day onto the property of a neighbor, the comedian W.C. Fields, and drowned in the swimming pool.

The character of Zorba also lost a son, and in the course of the show refers to the child twice.

"I have never, never, never talked about my son's death," Quinn said. "I've never used the term death in connection with my son. But every night doing the show I had to say, 'He's dead.' "

"At first I cut the line out of the play," Quinn said. "The director came to me and said: 'It's wrong. I know how painful it is but you'll have to do it.' He loved his son very much, this Zorba. He left his family because he couldn't bear being with them after the loss of his son. Zorba and I are very much alike."

In the play, Quinn as Zorba says: "When my little boy died, everyone cried. Everyone screamed. You know what I did? I danced. Everyone thought I had gone mad, but if I hadn't danced I would have gone mad."

Quinn's first marriage, to Katherine De Mille, Cecil B. De Mille's adopted daughter, ended in 1965 after 27 years. The couple had five children, including the son who died. In 1962 Quinn met Iolanda Addolori, who bore him two children and was pregnant with their third when the couple married in 1966. The Quinns now alternate between residences in New York and Rome.

"At the moment, I've done everything I can do with Zorba," Quinn said. "I've fulfilled my role as an actor."

Zorba fulfilled its producers' expectations as well. The production began touring the country in 1982, moving the next year to Broadway, where it played for 385 performances. It then went on the road again to even greater success, at times grossing as much as $500,000 a week, its producers said, well above the break-even point for shows, which often must gross between $200,000 and $250,000 a week.

Next week, Quinn said, he is off to Italy to make a film in which he plays the role of Long John Silver. Then he hopes to return to New York to do a musical about Picasso.

But on Sunday, when the final curtain comes down on Zorba, Quinn will say "nos vemos" -- Spanish for "we'll be seeing each other," he said -- rather than goodbye to the character he has come to know so well over the years.

"Zorba at 75," Quinn said, nodding as if embracing the thought for the first time. "Now that would be interesting."